Some communities leverage electronic monitoring (“EM”) systems to supplement, or even replace, traditional community supervision programs of offenders that require proactive communication with a probation officer or other government official. Because electronic monitoring systems, in many ways, provide more reliable monitoring of a participant offender than traditionally structured programs, offenders who would not normally be candidates for traditional community supervision programs can be released back into the community and effectively monitored and managed without significant risk of recidivism.
The cost of EM programs is largely attributable to initial connection rates and daily rates for monitoring an offender. There are a number of systems and methods generally available at the time of this writing for electronically monitoring offenders in a community supervision plan. For offender participants with a low risk profile, radio frequency (“RF”) based systems can be cost effective. However, for those offender participants associated with a higher risk profile, global positioning system (“GPS”) based technologies provide the more comprehensive functionality required to assure program compliance but usually at a significantly higher cost (at approx. five times) than traditional RF based systems.
The large gap in cost and supervision functionality between GPS and RF based systems force community supervision administrators to decline the inclusion of many offenders in a community supervision program. Though the cost of an RF based system is affordable, the minimal functionality presents ample opportunity for offender recidivism and, as such, only those offenders with the lowest risk profiles are candidates for its use.
On the other end of the spectrum, the GPS based systems offer robust monitoring, tracking and reporting functionality that is well suited for higher risk profile offenders, however, the cost of implementing a GPS system makes it overkill for medium and low risk offenders (although the functionality is desirable). To further complicate the application of current EM systems and methods, the risk profile of a typical offender is subject to change multiple times over the course of any given day.
One significant cost in EM systems may be the unit worn by the offender. If the unit supports GPS features, the hardware and software that are needed may be costly components of the system.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a system and method that may be cost effective and appropriate for a community supervision program to monitor and track participant offenders associated with a range of profile risk levels. Further, there is a need in the art for a system and method that can be cost effective in a community supervision program to provide comprehensive and customizable reporting of historical activity data of participant offenders associated with a range of profile risk levels.